It was in Chano Pozo's Harlem apartment in September 1947 that Dizzy Gillespie met Cuba's greatest percussionist, newly arrived from Havana. By the end of the month, Pozo was adding his conga drum to Gillespie's incendiary big band at a Carnegie Hall concert, and a new form of Afro-Cuban jazz was born. The collaboration was short-lived – Pozo was murdered outside an uptown bar barely a year later – but its consequences live on.
